Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2628 )

• Moral Judgements Depend on What Language We’re Speaking.

  Costa et al. use the famous trolley problem to offer another example of the incredible power of the tribal or "us versus them" nature of our psychology. Read more

  Posted on 04 July 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Consciousness is Constructed Through a Discrete Set of Activity Spaces.

  This fascinating work by Hudson et al. shows that as the brain recovers consciousness from a perturbation such as anesthesia, it does not follows a steady and... Read more

  Posted on 03 July 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Parenting Rewires Men's Brains.

  From Abraham et al., interesting material on a global "parental caregiving" neural network in our brains: Although contemporary socio-cultural changes... Read more

  Posted on 02 July 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks

  I have frequently noticed that simply reading the barrage of negative news in the daily New York Times about the myriad things in our world that aren't working... Read more

  Posted on 01 July 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Mind Reading Has to Be Taught.

  A review by Heyes and Frith notes how our learning to read minds is like learning to read print, except that it occurs much earlier in our development. Read more

  Posted on 30 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Stress Chemistry Predicts Age-related Cognitive Decline.

  Anderson et al. show, in studies on rats, that elevated hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) activity impairs not only hippocampal function during aging but may... Read more

  Posted on 27 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Megascience Efforts and the Brain.

  

  Grillner offers a commentary on the current megascience efforts (costing gazillions of dollars) to develop infrastructure for tools, modeling, or... Read more

  Posted on 26 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Executive Control Training Reduces Rumination.

  Rumination (thinking repetitively and passively about negative emotions, focusing on symptoms of distress) is a maladaptive form of self-focus that is a core... Read more

  Posted on 25 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Distinguishing the 50 United States with a Tightness-looseness Measure.

  

  Harrington and Gelfand offer a parsimonious mechanism for the striking cultural and political differences between the 50 United States by suggesting that the... Read more

  Posted on 24 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Early Music Training Enhances Cognitive Capacities in Adults.

  

  Further experiments on the profound effect that early musical training has on executive functioning in adults. The article has a useful introduction that... Read more

  Posted on 23 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• On the Precipice - a "Majority-Minority" America.

  Sigh.... another chilling vision of America's future from Craig and Richeson. Increasing polarization of groups: The U.S. Census Bureau projects that racial... Read more

  Posted on 20 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Dopamine Receptor Genes and Independent Versus Interdependent Social Orientation.

  Kitayama et al. make yet another stab at finding correlates of the often cited distinction of European American (more independent) and Asians (more... Read more

  Posted on 19 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Speed Reading Apps Blow Away Comprehension.

  Schotter et al. make a demonstration that being able to glance back during reading (not allowed under speed reading conditions) significantly enhances... Read more

  Posted on 18 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Watching the Physical Correlate of Memory Improvement During Sleep.

  

  Euston and Steenland do a perspective on nice work by Yang et al. that probes the role of sleep in altering mouse brain structures. I pass on their summary... Read more

  Posted on 17 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• When Being a Control-freak Doesn't Help....

  Bocanegra and Hommel note limits to the usefulness of cognitive control, showing, in particular, how overcontrol (induced by task instructions) can prevent the... Read more

  Posted on 16 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Brain Initiative Meets physics….Opps!

  Scientists leading the much-heralded Obama Brain Initiative initially providing $100 million (now NIH is seeking 4.5 billion for their part of the project) to... Read more

  Posted on 13 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Gratitude Reduces Economic Impatience.

  Whenever I come across yet another self-help laundry list of useful tricks for feeling better, and try a few, I repeatedly find that briefly following... Read more

  Posted on 12 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Childhood Bullying Predicts Adult Inflammation.

  How is this for a chilling finding? Childhood bullying leaves bullies with lower, and victims with higher, levels of chronic inflammation than those uninvolved... Read more

  Posted on 11 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Tonics for a Long Life?

  I've recently come across two articles relevant to life extension (work done with mice and worms, to be sure, but a human who reads these papers might well be... Read more

  Posted on 10 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Rapidity of Human Brain and Muscle Evolution - the Downside of Smarts?

  Roberts does a summary of fascinating work by Bozak et al. He sets the context: Somewhat narcissistically, one of the spectacular changes in phenotype that we... Read more

  Posted on 09 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE